Sunday, August 9, 2009

Movie Review 30: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Title: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra

Director: Stephen Sommers

Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes

Genre: Action, Sci-Fi

You know, I did not realise that G.I. Joe refers to a group of people rather than one person. I have always thought G.I. Joe similiar to Rambo... where there's only one person shooting at the bad guys. The reason I thought of that is because I did not watch/read anything related to G.I Joe, but I did watch the film G.I. Jane and it was just one woman going on shooting rampage... so, I thought G.I. Joe would be a male version of G.I. Jane... that is until my friend pointed this error to me in one of our mindless lunch conversations.

So, you must forgive me if I gave any wrong info regarding G.I. Joe since I have no knowledge on its history... so I'm just going to comment on what I observed.

So, this story is about selling weapons... well, no real surprise there... any military related plots has something to do with weapons. This time, it's an unstoppable 'will eat anything' nanomites. It will continue to eat and eat until nothing is there to eat or if you hit the kill switch. But it isn't clear on what the nanomites will actually eat... it is confirmed to eat metal... but I'm unsure if it will eat plastics, humans, plants or anything else... anyway, a group of soldiers were ambushed while they were on their way to deliver the weapons to the government. These enemies were using very high-tech weapons and the 'normal' soldiers were quickly disposed of, except for Conrad Hauser/Duke (Channing Tatum) and Wallace Weems/Ripcord (Marlon Wayans). They were saved by the G.I. Joes and soon it became a war of stealing, counter stealing the weapons!

My impression of this movie is good. It is really action-packed and there is rarely a dull moment. Also, the characters portrayed are very interesting as each is unique on its own... very much like X-Men... without their super powers of course. There's Scarlet (Rachel Nichols) a female shooter, Snake Eyes (Ray Park) sword wielding ninja, Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje) an ordinance expert and Breaker (Said Taghmaoui), a hacker.

Also, as with X-Men too, since there are so many characters, some of the relatively 'unimportant' characters were left out... but the director managed to focus on three to four characters, which is really more than one could ask for in such a big cast.

Of course, there are love scenes in the movie... which I must say is the one part that is 'not so nice' in the movie. There are some twists in the movie too... although I managed to see through most of the plot before half of the movie... though I really did not manage to guess The Doctor's identity and most certainly did not expect him to become the Cobra Commander (oooppss spoiler :P). Apart from that, I pretty much expect everything else including Zartan's mission when I saw him changing his looks :P.

Tech gadgets is also another focus point of the movie. You'll see a whole slew of pretty cool gadgets. I must however, say that there are certain loopholes in the movie. For example, even though it is established that Ripcord is a capable pilot, I don't think it is believable for one to be able to drive (and very good at it too) a prototype jet without any experience before... for God's sake, he doesn't even know how to fire the missiles!

Also, I'm not sure if Snake Eyes is supposed to be half naked or wearing suit. I mean the real actor is of course wearing a suit... but I think the Snake Eyes character is supposed to be half naked, which means he has black skin... but his childhood memories shows that he has white skin. How the heck did that happen?

Still I would say that this movie is worth the time and money to watch in the cinema. I have expected the cinemas to be packed with people... I thought that the G.I. Joe fame would be on par with the Transformers... after all, it's all guys stuff :P. Maybe it's due to the H1N1 fear, perhaps?

Trivia: G.I. stands for Government Issue... and oh, Brendan Fraser makes a cameo!

Bottomline: It's worth the time and money.

Bamboo Ranking: 3.8 / 5.0

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